Posts com a Tag ‘Medieval Welsh Genealogy: An Introduction and Textual Study (T)’

This substantial book does two jobs. It undertakes the first full textual study of Welsh genealogical literature in the Middle Ages, and it provides a new critical edition of the most important texts. In the second of these roles it replaces Peter Bartrum’s Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts (1966), the workhorse on which everyone relied till now. In the first role, however, it has no predecessor. Bartrum offered only a modest commentary and apparatus. That cannot be said of Ben Guy’s book. The task of reviewing this imposing volume calls to mind a certain early Welsh poem in which an inferior warrior takes on the hero, like ‘a shrew that scrabbled against a cliffside.’

Readers may want to know what is so important about genealogy, and also why such basic source criticism is still needed in 2021. Genealogical thinking pervaded medieval Welsh views of the past and there was a dedicated literature of genealogy from a quite early date. There is plenty of material, therefore, and the general shortage of historical sources from early medieval Wales means that genealogies play an outsize role in the reconstruction of the country’s political history. As to why the texts were still in such a deplorable state of confusion, that is a consequence of an abundance of material combined with a shortage of investigators. Few historians have the time or inclination for this work. The astonishingly productive Peter Bartrum was an amateur scholar who worked in his professional life for the Meteorological Office. He has had few emulators, though the name of David Thornton deserves honourable mention, and other historians have dealt with individual problems. As a corpus, however, the earliest Welsh genealogical literature has never been reduced to textual order – until now. Leia Mais